


Farther Shore

by pherede



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-29
Updated: 2013-03-29
Packaged: 2017-12-06 21:03:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/740134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pherede/pseuds/pherede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Valinor is a place, not a heaven; and Gimli is still mortal, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Farther Shore

The gray in Gimli’s beard did not advance upon that shore; nor did his spirit flag, and with joy and holy awe the two discovered the twilit glens and jeweled vales of the Vanyar, until they came at last to the hill of Túna and looked back upon the stars.

Few Sindar had come, in these late ages, to the Further Shore; those who remained scattered feral with the Green-Elves, or swore fealty to Thranduil Elvenking. The Vanyar were so different, with their lilting tones and their slow methodical movements, a crystalline people but curious, and they asked him many questions— the foremost among them why he, out of all the seed of Doriath who had chosen the light of the stars over the Trees, now stood among him, and with such a strange companion?

Legolas had little to say in answer, though they questioned him about his father and about the doings of Melkor’s lieutenant in the East; but they were easily diverted when Gimli spoke, for no great number of them had ever spoken with a dwarf, and fewer still to a dwarf who looked on them with amiable countenance.

They dwelt upon Túna for a time, until Legolas awoke with the dawn and saw the morning light upon the gray once more spreading in Gimli’s hair, and felt in his pulse the aging weakness of his heart; and after this they pressed onward and inward, to the deep caverns of this jeweled land, to halls scored and hewn by the hands of Fëanor himself. Gimli wept to see this, the work of Aulë’s ancient student who had learned and grown to mastery while the dwarves slept; and onward they pressed, urgency now growing in Legolas’s stride even as weariness crept into Gimli’s eyes.  


They saw many things together, moving as swiftly as they ever had upon their dread chase across Middle-Earth; in time the questions asked of them were no longer for their parentage and culture but for the breadth of their experience, for the jeweled wealth of their memory, for all the color and sound and shape that so many of the Vanyar with their deliberate ancient ways had never stepped apart to see. They rested wherever the road lay when the moon rose; they took what hospitality was granted for their tales, and they carried on, ever slower but never failing, as Gimli’s breath grew short and Legolas saw his doom come slow upon him, that eternal sundering beyond which there lay no reunion in the halls of Mandos.  


He had given up his father, his birthright, his loyalty to the moon and stars of Middle-Earth; he had come to be a stranger in a land of his eldest and most distant kin, to live out his thousands and thousands of decades under strange and shifting lights that twisted beyond violet and beneath crimson, where shadows sang and even the darkness was sweet, but where no childhood friend would ever again be seen. Far away, his companions lived out their lives, gathering the rewards of their triumph at Pelennor (though word came to him that some member of that Fellowship had made his way to the very foot of Manw ë’s throne); but the morning came when Gimli could not rise, and he breathed his last upon Legolas’s breast and gave up his spirit into the hands of his Mahal, and left Legolas alone at last.  


Only seventy-five years had he won for them; not even a century, only a moment in the long lonesome days of a wandering Sindar prince. Only seventy-five years, when all his kin that passed beyond merely met again in the halls of Mandos, in the land where no love was truly severed but his own. Only seventy-five years.


End file.
